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Welcome to a special edition of Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, posted on April 21st, 2010. I'm Steve

Murski. This week on the podcast, the growth experiment worked really well for some people

for a long time, and now it isn't working well. Now it's bumped up against its limits.

That's writer Bill McKibbon, the scholar in residence at Vermont's Middlebury College.

He's also the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign. MacGibbon, the scholar in residence at Vermont's Middlebury College, he's also the founder of

350.org, an international climate campaign. Macbibbon's first book was the 1989 bestseller

The End of Nature. It was the first book for a general audience about climate change. He's written

numerous books since, the latest of which is called Earth, making a life on a tough

new planet. In it, he argues that relentless growth is fundamentally altering the environment

and our ability to live in it, and that maintenance of wealth and resources instead of expansion

must be society's new driver. He spells Earth, by the way, E-A-A-A-R-T-H to point out the fact that the Earth

today is a very different place from the one on which he was born. The April issue of

Scientific American includes an exclusive excerpt from the book, and Scientific Americans Mark

Fischetti recently visited McKibbon at his solar-powered

home in Ripton, Vermont.

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